App Store releases are increasing due to a new gold rush on subscription apps. Review times have gotten longer as the review team at Apple is being spammed.
Most of these apps are rudimentary habit trackers, time management apps etc. so not much creativity, much more recycled ideas. More code != better ideas though.
+160k apps a year, that's only 84% above pre-AI era (safe to say that apps were not routinely built with AI in 2023 yet). Noticeable increase but doesn't feel dramatic, especially since yes, majority of those new apps are low-effort trash like those described in this thread.
Also a lot more clone ideas these days. AI has definitely empowered people to write things from scratch, either as a product to sell or as internal projects inside companies.
The referenced post has a very high change of being planted. The upvote count is an anomaly for a brand new account, few sentences, no link, Tell HN post.
I upvoted it by mistake, it looked genuine at first. However the comments contain a lot of "everything is awesome" responses without backing up their claims. The poster does not participate in the discussion at all.
I like HN but it seems to be getting spammed with hidden ads.
There's a lot of tech banter on Twitter and LinkedIn, much of which is noise you can filter out.
SaaS is not dead. People and businesses benefit from having relatively cheap access to maintained standardized software.
The "SaaS is dead" idea comes from some people using coding agents and thinking that companies will now produce their own internal software packages (CRM etc.) instead of buying in. Why would they bother?
However, highly-specific internal software might see interesting developments.
There's multiple things happening here. People are using LLMs to write, for sure. It's only natural to absorb what you consume, so as people read more LLM generated content they can unintentionally emit it.
And then there's classic confirmation bias; a lot of people wrote in dry academic prose.
Everyone is talking about how many things they are building. Non-devs suddenly building... But nobody seems to call out the basic law of supply and demand.
You can be the greatest marketer but you will fail when all channels are flooded. Thinking your "taste" will save you is a false fallacy, most mainstream products suck and people still buy them. There's not an infinite demand for software.
It will eventually settle in some new market configuration. However devs shouldn't have broken their market by letting everyone in, was a stupid professional move.
Yes but back then, everybody just got bored of their Ataris and moved on.
Nobody is throwing out their phone or computer. Software will still be needed.
That said, there will be a lot of noise, with 100 choices in each category, how does one rise to the top? Is it simply the one that sticks around the longest and doesn't become abandonware?
The agents are good enough to get results when an experienced person is properly guiding these tools.
However, during the holidays there was a big marketing campaign, mainly on Twitter.
Everyone started posting the same talking points repeatedly and suddenly, and triggered a storm of fomo perfect for when everyone was not working.
There was no sudden huge jump, I've been using AI code tools since 2024 and was surprised to see this sudden hype when the tools worked ok before.
This is also my feeling. When people keep referring to big jumps or inflection points, I am left confused, because the models have felt good for a long time and feel like they are getting steadily better. This could be biased by what I use them for though.
This is the lifecycle of SaaS tho. It opens up opportunities for competitors to launch and build something more nieche, which is good for customers. And then it repeats
Most of these apps are rudimentary habit trackers, time management apps etc. so not much creativity, much more recycled ideas. More code != better ideas though.
https://www.a16z.news/i/185469925/app-store-engage https://42matters.com/ios-apple-app-store-statistics-and-tre...